
Although there are many job roles in cyber security, but in this article we will discuss the most common ones. Even though it is necessary to have the right skill set. But, it is also important to understand what different roles mean and what each role expects from you. This guide aims to provide beginners with an understanding of the diverse opportunities in cybersecurity. This will not only help you create your own path but also aid you in choosing the right career role. This guide will help you answer the following questions
- What is this role all about?
- What am I supposed to do in this role?
- Which resources will help me up-skill for this role?
- Which certifications can help me in my career growth?
- Any challenges that I will face in this role?
Background
To start a career in cyber security, it is important to have some foundational knowledge and skills. Regardless of the role you choose, there are some basics that you need to understand for a strong foothold. Not all of these skills are a must have but will help you grow in your path.
- Networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DNS, Firewalls, for understanding the data flow
- Operating System, specially Linux and Windows, for server-side management and CLI proficiency
- Basic scripting or programming helps in automating tasks
Roles in Offensive Cyber Security

Offensive security focuses primarily on identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in the applications, systems, and networks. These roles require a deep understanding of how cyber attacks are conducted.
- What is the attackers’ mindset and thinking process?
- How do they approach a target asset?
- How to stay anonymous?
- What techniques do they use to clear the tracks?
- How do they bypass security restrictions?
All of these questions come into mind of a naive as well as professional person. The following roles will help you answer these questions.
Penetration Tester
A penetration tester simulates the role of an attacker against the digital assets. These assets may include the software applications and networks. Their goal is to find the weaknesses and security loopholes in the assets. Once they find the vulnerabilities, they report them responsibly to the respective teams along with the mitigation.
A penetration tester must possess a combination of technical expertise, critical thinking, and ethical responsibility. They must perform vulnerability assessment to uncover potential weaknesses. After that, they perform penetration testing to exploit the weaknesses. Furthermore, pentesting is more about assumptions. You must be able to assume that which vulnerability could potentially be in this application and then start testing the app for that bug. You are also required to provide the fix for the bugs as finding the loophole is not enough.
The tools that are commonly used include BurpSuite, Nessus, nmap, etc. Also, you can pursue the certifications like OSCP, OSWE, and PNPT etc.
Red Team Specialist
A red team specialist emulates Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) to test the organization’s overall security posture. They mimic a threat actor and target whole organization with some goal. Their approach may include the following steps:
- Get inside the secure building without buzzing any alarms
- Clone employees’ badges or cards for later escalation
- Access the sensitive areas of the building
- Eavesdrop on the meetings and discussions
- Steal the documents
- Leave a backdoor
- Get out of building without being noticed and caught
Note that the red team specialist observes each and every minor details. At the end of the red team engagement, they report all of the observations to the authorized personnel, mostly the CEO, CTO, or CISO. The goal of red team engagement is to challenge the defensive team and their detection capabilities.
Organizations often hire red team specialists to find the weaknesses in their defense systems and teams. As this job role emulates an APT, the specialist is provided with a goal and a scope which lists the limitations of the engagement. The specialist is then free to use any TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) to achieve the goal observing the scope. Red team specialists often create their own scripts (rootkits) to automatically exploit the system and install backdoors once specialists get initial access.
These specialists use tools including Metasploit Framework, Command & Control Servers, and exploitation scripts etc. You can also pass the certifications including CRTO, CRTL, CRTP, OSED, etc.
Roles in Defensive Cyber Security

Defensive security focuses on protecting an organization’s systems, networks, and applications from cyber threats. It involves anticipating, detecting, and responding to attacks, as well as implementing measures to prevent them. These roles require a deep understanding of the threat landscape and the ability to safeguard critical assets from a wide range of adversaries.
- What are the strategies to build a robust defense?
- How do defenders detect early signs of an attack?
- What tools and techniques to use to monitor and analyze security events?
- How to effectively respond to security incidents?
- How do you ensure that systems are quickly restored after a breach?
These are some of the questions that both newcomers and professionals in defensive cybersecurity strive to answer. The following roles will guide you in understanding how to defend against attackers and how to ensure the integrity and security of an organization’s infrastructure.
SOC Analyst
The job of a SOC Analyst is monitoring and analyzing an organization’s security posture in real-time to detect and respond to potential security incidents. They continuously monitor the network traffic, system and app logs, and alerts. The purpose of all this monitoring is to identify the suspicious activities. Once they find a true positive alert, they must report and respond to it.
For a SOC Analyst, it is important to gain expertise in using and integrating SIEM tools like Splunk, and ELK etc. They must be able to prepare playbooks to respond to specific security incidents or scenarios. You can pursue the certifications like CySA+, and CompTIA Security+ etc.
Application Security Engineer
This role is a mixture of both offensive and defensive cyber security roles. Their job is to ensure that an organization’s software applications are designed and maintained with robust security measures throughout SDLC. These security engineers conduct VAPT along with performing threat modeling, and source code reviews. They possess a mixture of skills of a penetration tester and a developer. Because, they need to read and understand the source code and find bugs in that as well. Furthermore, they work closely with the development teams to fix the bugs.
They work with IT teams to create policies and procedures to implement secure coding practices and other security guidelines. Also, they give trainings to the in-house development teams.
They use similar tools as that of a penetration tester with the addition of some threat modeling tools like Threat Dragon etc. You can pursue the certifications like OSCP, OSWE, and CISSP etc.
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